In 2003, Yusef Komunyakaa’s partner, the poet Reetika Vazirani, killed their 2-year-son and then killed herself.
Komunyakaa’s ex-wife, the Australian novelist Mandy Sayer, said she had felt suicidal during their marriage. When she heard of the tragedy, she decided to write a memoir. The Poet’s Wife appeared in 2014.
One of the timeless questions about art is the connection between the work and its maker. It’s natural, when you wonder about an artist’s work, to look into the artist’s life for clues. Sometimes, you can find details that give you insight. Sometimes, you can end up questioning the integrity of the voice that’s talking to you. That, of course, is fatal to art.
I mention this because I have started to read Komunyakaa’s poetry again.
I find wonderful things in his work. But I know people who would not.
I suspect that many veterans come to Komunyakaa through his war poems. And I suppose it would be possible to put questions about his later life, his marriage and that tragedy, if you could just focus on the war poems.
I cannot. Some of his most interesting poems are about how men try to love women.
In “My Father’s Love Letters,” the poet is still a little boy. On Fridays, his father would open a can of beer and ask his son to write a letter to the boy’s mother.
He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. …
The boy is happy his mother is gone and wants to slip in a reminder that even a good jazz tune won’t make the swelling go down.
His father, though illiterate, could look at a blueprint and tell how many bricks it would take to build each wall. But at letter writing time, he would stand
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.
I think that’s a wonderful poem.
As to the questions it raises about life and art, I just don’t know.
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